Saturday, July 4, 2009

surgery update

Hi all. I wanted to give you the update on surgery. All went well with the pre-op appointments on Thursday. However, we received a phone call from the hospital on our way home. Our insurance told them that the hospital is out of network, and we don't have out of network coverage, s0 they would not cover the surgery. We had to cancel the surgery for the time being. Very frustrating.

Good news though moving forward, Derek's HR rep was on the phone with Cigna Thursday evening, and we have received word that they will call the hospital on Monday and that they will cover the surgery. Hopefully we can reschedule for later in the week. The other half of the problems stem from equipment availability at UofM. There's a machine called ECMO, basically if things didn't go well in surgery, this comes into play to work as a patients heart and lungs outside of the operating room. Due to high pneumoniaoccurrences stemming from the Swine Flu, a lot of these machines are being used. If one is not available, surgery doesn't happen. Not likely that we would need it, but still a safety net. At U0fM we learned that all of the surgeries on Monday were cancelled already due to this, except for Evans. If someone went on the last one Sunday, they would have still cancelled.

So, Monday we should have the insurance cleared up, then we hope the ECMO usage is down so that Evan will be able to get scheduled.

I'll keep updated as I can. However, I currently am without computer so may be slow with updates. This weekend we're enjoying family and friends, while celebrating the 4th of July and hope you're doing the same!